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Rethinking Sensitivity

A couple of posts on this blog have described our lab’s work on parents’ mind-mindedness—their ability to ‘tune in’ to their babies’ thoughts and feelings—and its positive impact on children’s development. One question we often get is: You say you’re describing a mind-minded parent, but aren’t you just describing a sensitive one?

Sensitivity has been a critical concept in this kind of research ever since it was defined by Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues in the early 1970s. It’s timely to discuss differences between sensitivity and mind-mindedness because 2013 marks the centenary of Ainsworth’s birth. Ainsworth is most famous for developing a simple procedure for assessing attachment (the strange situation), but her work characterizing the quality of mother–baby interaction in the first year of life, based on painstaking home-based observation, is an equally impressive achievement.

Mary Ainsworth

The first point to make is that sensitivity is about more than just responding promptly to the baby’s cues. Ainsworth and her colleagues saw the sensitive mother as “capable of perceiving things from [the child’s] point of view” [1], whereas the insensitive mother tries to “socialize with the baby when he is hungry, play with him when he is tired, and feed him when he is trying to initiate social interaction” [2]. The downside is that Ainsworth’s own scale to measure sensitivity was not precise in its operationalization, giving only a brief narrative description of caregivers defined (on one of five points of a global scale) as ‘highly insensitive’, ‘insensitive’, ‘inconsistently sensitive’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘highly sensitive’. Because the exact types of behavior indicating sensitivity were not defined, Ainsworth and colleagues’ original emphasis on the appropriateness of the parent’s response has often been lost in subsequent research on sensitivity.

Sensitivity assesses caregivers’ behavior when interacting with their babies, whereas mind-mindedness focuses on how the caregiverthinks about the baby. To be more precise, the most useful operationalization of mind-mindedness sees it as caregivers’ tendency to talk in an attuned manner about what their babies are thinking or feeling. As we argued in a recent paper [3], looking only at behavioral responses to the baby’s cues can lead to misinterpretations, whereas focusing on what caregivers say gives you a more accurate picture of whether they are tuning in to their babies’ thoughts and feelings.

Take the example of a mother withdrawing a toy when her young baby calmly turns away from it. If we look only at the mother’s behavior, we would assume that she was behaving sensitively in withdrawing the toy when the infant disengaged from it. But if we also listen to what the mother says during this interaction, her response might be interpreted differently.

Imagine if the mother said, “Oh, that really scared you” or “You just don’t like playing with me, do you?” as she withdrew the toy. In both cases, you’d get the impression that the mom had misinterpreted what was going on for the baby. In contrast, if the mother had commented that the baby didn’t like the toy, or wasn’t interested in it, that would seem to be an appropriate interpretation of her baby’s experience. In our coding scheme, the former type of comment is termed non-attuned, while the latter type is termed appropriate. This is the crucial point: the same seemingly sensitive behavioral response can indicate either appropriate attunement to, or a misinterpretation of, the baby’s thoughts and feelings. Assessing mind-mindedness gives researchers a handle on whether caregivers’ responses are driven by accurate or inaccurate interpretations of their babies’ experiences, and many researchers think it's truer to the spirit of Ainsworth's writings than more global measures of 'sensitivity'.

So what can we do to make ourselves more mind-minded as parents? The good news is that many of us already talk to our babies about what might be going on inside their heads. But don’t worry about doing anything special to train yourself to become mind-minded—the best way to learn about what your baby might be thinking or feeling is to watch them closely. Does your baby like being held in a certain way or seem interested in a particular toy? If you know the answer to these questions, then you’re already able to read what your child is thinking and feeling—all you need to do now is to talk about those likes and interests out loud. And don’t worry if you get it wrong sometimes, because you wouldn’t recognize that you’d misread your baby’s experiences if you weren’t trying to tune in to their thoughts and feelings! There are some feelings, though, that babies never have: they never do things to be spiteful, mean or annoying—if they’re fussing, it’s because there’s something not quite right.

In the next post, I’ll describe our recent findings on how different profiles of maternal mind-mindedness can actually predict what kind of attachment security the baby will show.

Isn't "mind-mindedness" the same thing as "cognitive empathy" and "affective empathy"?

I've read that the definition of "cognitive empathy" is the ability to accurately perceive and name the emotions that someone else is feeling, by observing their facial expression, tone of voice, body language, and possibly other more subtle signs. Its the ability to "read" someone else, even to the point of discerning their subconscious desires or goals.

Then there is "affective empathy", which is the ability to care about other's emotions because you can feel them as though they are your own. You fill with joy and you cheer with your friend who is happy, and you fill with compassion and comfort your friend who is grieving. Some can even feel something like a resonant echo of pain in their own flesh if they observe a wound in another's body.

If I understand what I've read correctly, those with Asperger's have difficulty with cognitive empathy, but once they are told and understand that a friend is feeling happy or sad or afraid, etc., the individual with Asperger's is able to experience and express affective empathy.

On the other hand, those with borderline pd, narcissistic pd, antisocial pd and psychopathy are highly skilled at cognitive empathy, but lack affective empathy. Psychopaths in particular are uncannily good at "reading" other people, but they only utilize this skill in the service of more effectively manipulating and exploiting others for their own benefit.

I guess I'm just quibbling with the terminology; if an existing term works well, then why change it? (And, "mind-mindedness" sounds like a stutter, to me.)

I do agree however that this attunement or empathy is absolutely crucial for a baby to experience from his or her mother, in order for a normal, healthy mother-child bond to develop. The lack of healthy, mutual mother-child attachment and bonding can have devastating long-term negative impact on the child.

It's a very good question and one that goes deeper than terminology, I think. Especially when we are talking about babies and small children, it's important to distinguish between having a capacity and using it. Let's say there was some social-cognitive capacity underlying mind-mindedness (I think it might be related to the different kinds of empathy you mention, but there are important differences too). You might expect that capacity to differ in strength between adult individuals. You'd have to find evidence for that, though, rather than just assuming it. The discussion of individual differences in social cognition in adulthood can become rather muddled, because very often people simply carry over social-cognitive concepts (such as theory of mind) from developmental psychology research without really asking whether they can be meaningfully applied in adulthood. For example, most kids 'get' false belief around age 4; whatever you are measuring in theory of mind tasks in adulthood must therefore be quite different.

Anyway, let's suppose for the sake of argument that you could isolate such a social-cognitive variable. It's one thing having the capacity; it's another thing using it. That is, you might be perfectly capable of attributing mental states to other people, but you might just feel that such an attribution is not appropriate in the case of a six-month-old baby! That is, some people seem willing to make that attribution—they think that a baby is the kind of individual who can have thoughts and feelings—and others are less willing.

In our research, mind-mindedness seems to behave as a relationship-specific variable rather than simply mapping onto a general social-cognitive trait in the parent. We need much more research on this, but that's where the evidence points at the moment. And that's why I think mind-mindedness is so strongly predictive of attachment, which is about a relationship rather than a cognitive capacity.

Finally, mind-mindedness is not a new term; we've been writing on this topic for more than 15 years now. It is different to the other terms out there, and the key difference is between having the capacity and being willing to use it.